Ill in the Head
by Sixty Morphy
Summary: A story of two officers of the Gotham Police Force, and what becomes of their family and their two grown-up children, Anna and Bill. A study in tragedy, madness and insanity. The Joker and Bruce Wayne are in it so far.
1. Chapter 1

Mr. and Mrs. Shatter were both officers in the Gotham police force. They had a daughter, me, who was sixteen and in high school, and a boy, Bill, my brother, who was nineteen. We were both highly physical as children and trained in the martial arts. We could not just fire guns; we were true proficients. Mr. and Mrs. Shatter were very successful in their careers and very loyal and creative, able officers, who had fought with the police against the Joker many times and were the two officers who had come off the best in those instances; the most effective while being the most in danger. They were simply particularly strong. It was joked amongst the officers and the Joker might have a personal vendetta against them, since they were the "Superhero" police officers of the force. They were also known to be very straight-laced people. Both of them were good friends of Bruce Wayne and often attended his events. I often heard my parents remarking on what a good man he appeared to be, and such a shame it was that he drank. Bill ignored such talk, I suppose deep inside his own mind thinking that a man could be whatever he liked. Bill and I did not know Bruce Wayne. We were too young to drink and only heard about him occasionally.

What happened to my family was more or less, in the terms of Gotham City, peculiar. Not on the whole, strange, but peculiar.

Mr. and Mrs. Shatter being so extremely conservative, it is likely that their offspring could not manage to live up to their strict standards as to what a young man and a woman, in their eyes, were meant to be, but us children did their best to be conservative, and therefore we were conservative kids ourselves. Bill always had, what did he have? A wonky smile and wore blue sweaters and jeans. He read Shakespeare, he told creative jokes, and his mind, though Mr. and Mrs. Shatter and me, their daughter were not deficient, his was, oh, how infinitely superior! He was regarded as the brightest person in the family and had a scholarship to Gotham University in just about any subject he was inclined to take. He had taken two years off, claiming he was still not sure which subject he wanted to make the focus of his career and his life. I was simply in high school, still learning. What happened I can only tell from my point of view.

On this particular night, I lay in my bed, and as the cars and trucks went by out of the window, and the yells from the streets lifted up toward her, I drew out a sigh. I loved Gotham City. Bill, my brother, was not so happy here. He had varied ideas; he wanted to be a farmer, he wanted to be captaining a yacht, he wanted fresh air. But he had a sensitivity that made me think he was just unhappy about how much he actually _did _like Gotham City.

"But when are Mom and Dad back from that function at Wayne's?"

"Two in the morning, they said, right on two." Bill was bouncing a ball up at the ceiling. It was a room for both of us; we still shared it. The ball didn't bother me. Thwack. Thwack. A rubber ball. Mom and Dad said that Bill had the brains, but that my mind was _strong. _Like diamond. He could be scatty, vague and stressed. Sometimes he broke apart and spent days meditating in his room. I felt uncomfortable with that compliment about my mind. I suppose I thought I felt stronger because my strength had never been tried. When I weighed my mind myself I felt that there was so much of it unexplored.

"Why did they go to Wayne's on their wedding anniversary?"

"I guess they found it fancier than any celebration _they _could pull." Outside there was a thunderstorm. Rain poured down on all the various greys of Gotham, which blended seamlessly as usual with the grey of the sky, and the whole was painted by streaks of lighting rain.

"They'll get wet," I remarked, curling my fingers around the white windowsill, and settling my chin on my fingers. Rain curled in streams down the window. Spots of rain joined up with other longer pieces, and fell down heavy with the weight of water joined. I liked watching these things. Bill came over to me and breathed on the window, then went back to his book.

"They shall be late," he said, "but other than that?"

"They'll be going on their favourite walk home at the moment. The graveyard walk. They find it "quaint" I think." I rolled over and adopted a book of my own, and we two thought nothing more of it. Waking drowsily from my book at four in the morning, and finding my brother still reading, I asked where they were.

"They never arrived," he said softly, still staring at the pages.

"_What?_"

"Lieutenant Fairley called. He said they were suddenly called about something the Joker was doing or something." His voice sounded blase. He had never particularly cared about the Joker.

"The Joker? God, that would be difficult. But it's as usual. This is like it has been before."

"Truly? Yeah. I guess we just wait. Bed?"

"Yeah. Bed."

I put my head, aching with the excitement of the situation, down on the pillow, and my blonde hair covered my view.

"Turn that light out, brother."

The next day we awoke grumpy and stiff, and were angry at each other for no reason. We talked as little as possible as we both got up, and took turns showering and dressing in the bathroom and the bedroom. We had slept through a message on the answering machine. My parents were dead, along with a few other officers. Other officers had died before. But our parents? I listened to the message in silence. So did Bill. No tears came from my eyes. The blood simply drained from my face as I turned away. I tried to cry. I could see the same expression on Bill's face. He was expecting to be agitated, but wasn't. We were concentrating more on listening.

The end of the message:

"...do not come down and try to see your parents' bodies for any reason. If you truly want to see them, Bill and Anna, do so when they are in the morgue."

Bill and I sat down hard across from each other at the kitchen table. I noticed no tears in his eyes either, but his lips were drawn into a tight line and were also bloodless. Our eyes flickered up to meet each other, but immediately flickered down. Cheerfully the clock dinged when we would normally be awake. Bill went over to it and with clumsy hands, turned it over and tried to switch the alarm off. He failed and threw it to the ground, stamped on it with all his weight. The batteries exploded out of it and the shell cracked.

"The Joker," Bill said, speaking my mind also, "must have done something to our parents' bodies the police don't want us to see."

"We have to see it," I said, a lump rising and falling in my throat as though on a swell of seawater, then simply sliding up and down greasily. I couldn't get rid of that lump, so I swallowed it and it sat in my stomach. "We have to see the bodies."

"Why?" Bill, frowning, looked sideways at the table.

"I want to see what he did. You don't have to come along," I ran to put on my favourite crimson trenchcoat. My hair I pulled into a ponytail.

"I will. I will come along," he said, and got up. "The evidence cameras will still be clickin'." He added in a lower voice.

"Let's go," I took my brother's arm, a custom we had adopted over the years, and we both went to the site, a chemical junkyard, - I had forgotten by now the story given to us as to why the Joker had targeted the chemical corps – and together we were very quiet. When backs were turned we slipped under police tape and hid our faces. We both wore trenchcoats, common police standbys, and two hats from our parents' closet.

And then we saw them. Bill made a kind of whooshing, ssshing noise up into his mouth beside me. I cracked my head on an overhanging pole just as my parents came into sight, so as I recovered from the throbbing head with eyes closed, listening to the strange saliva-rushing noise my brother had made at the sight, I prepared to see what I thought I had seen -

I opened my eyes. It was as I had just seen.

My mother, my conservative mother...but my father, my conservative father! He was slick with baby oil and was wearing a see-through plastic boob tube to match my mother's. Under his was a black shirt of netting. He wore pink high heels and a pearl necklace. A gentle, pink little girl's friendship bracelet on his left arm. He wore long, red tranny nails, so long as to be almost claws. My father's normality was being mocked; entirely mocked; no, sliced to pieces. My mother was wearing – wearing a strap-on dildo, a clown wig and a t-shirt – "Honk if you love jesting." It was the end. It was bizarre. My mouth was wrenched sideways.

"Get out of here!" his face pinched, Lieutenant Fairley strode toward us with his arms swinging at his sides. "Didn't I tell you not to – oh, no! No, man, no!"

"You can't keep us from seeing them," I said.

"Yeah," said Will, his face a complete blank.

Lieutenant Fairley stopped and looked uncomfortable.

"It's best you go home."

"We have no home," Will muttered to me, "our parents are dead. We're orphans. My father left everything to his brother to settle in his will. We have nothing."

"We have nothing? Surely our uncle..."

"Have you _met_ Uncle Richard? Our dad trusted him. Trust, nothing! If the Joker hadn't just murdered our parents, Uncle Richard probably would have to get at that money. _That's _the joke."

"Really?"

"Didn't you ever study Richard when he was talking to our father? How flattering he was? How much he talked about how he didn't care about money? The lady doth protest too much."

"Surely..."

"No. He'll take the money, sell the apartment and move to Hawaii."

"No," I said, "but then, I never studied the way he talked to Dad the way you did. Perhaps I skim-read those interactions, but then again, they never interested _me_."

And then we had our backs to our parents, and then we were walking away.

"What do we care about money?" I said, "our parents – just died."

"Yeah," Bill said, still with that weird, twisted, vague expression on his face that I was sure echoed mine. We simply walked and walked, through a main street of Gotham City, a brightly lit street, passing a hot dog vendor, we fell upon the food and found our stomachs completely empty. We ate and ate, three hot dogs each. We had made no sound since Bill said 'yeah'.

"Yeah," Bill said, again, "but what does that mean, symbolically?"

"What do you mean, symbolically?"

"How does it relate to our lives? I mean, what does it _mean _to our lives," Bill said. "What does it represent to us?"

"Bill? Shouldn't we be grieving right now? Not asking these philosophical questions? _Shouldn't _we be sobbing, crying, falling to the ground, - " And yet, even if he was asking questions and thinking instead of grieving, I was also talking about sobbing, crying, and falling to the ground, and yet I was talking about it and not doing it.

"They're gone, the Joker killed them, I'm not saying 'move on' but – I'm asking, sis," he sat down on a doorstep and I joined him, "what does that inspire you to do with your life? Knock the Joker off? Fight crime? Be a police officer too? That's just what I'm thinking." His mouth was open and the cold early morning air puffed regularly out of it; sun shone through his gaping mouth. He continued, "_What do you want to do with your life, now that you're alone?_"

"Now that I'm alone?" I suddenly felt alone. Music from an open window sang, _Darling, I want to tell you just how much, I love you... _I pulled my trenchcoat over my cold knees.

"Shouldn't we be crying?" I said again.

"I don't know about that either," said Bill, "but we're the chidren of police officers. That explains it. Right? Like we always knew this might happen?"

"They never raised us to expect their deaths," I said soberly, "but they did raise us to think hard and think critically. Maybe that means we're not reacting with emotion first. Maybe emotion will come later." But we knew it wouldn't. And it was the way they had died. Like we had seen two other people die, and our parents had just disappeared. I couldn't get it out of my mind: had they been forced into that dress alive, or dead? Forced to give up their identities, and, well, die? _Give up their identities..._

They had sacrified their identities before they died. Not on purpose. But they had.

We sat on the grey, cracked strairs to someone's doorstep; someone's house, someone's life behind a door, and we were latchkey kids, whatever those were. There were many things passing through my mind at that time, and strangely enough, none of them were the Joker. Whenever I felt I might think of the Joker, I felt my whole mind spasm and my body cringe and it blinked away again. My head reeled. I sucked air through my teeth. My brain thumped in time with my heart.

"Let's get home," I said, "I need sleep."

"Yeah," said Bill, but he looked like his eyes would never shut again, so obviously he didn't agree.


	2. Chapter 2

Bill was right. Uncle Richard came immediately down to stay in the apartment after our parents' deaths. He wore a shirt sticky and grubby with oil and his nails were dirty. He was a mechanic. He talked of Grieving and Passing On and With the Angels Now while he looked around the apartment from top to bottom, wall to wall, his head twisting around. I could imagine his head spinning on his neck to get a look at everything.

"But, kids," he said, "this is your time. You graduate soon, Anna. Bill, it's about time you got out and made your own way in this world, my friend. Move out. Anna?" he said, and as he said it he mused, and looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on the hem of my skirt. "You can stay until you graduate. Then you're out of here, babe." And he put on sunglasses. "We have to be realistic."

"What about the money," said Bill. "Our parents' money."

"It's my money," said Richard, "and I'd settled it within myself I wanted you kids to be independent now your parents are gone. You can't lean on me; you're not seven and five years old, are you?"

"I don't want to stay with you," I said.

"Suit yourself," he said, and smiled, "see? You want to make your own life, don't you, Anna? You two are independent, an adult and an almost-adult. Kids who live on inheritances waste their money and become rich and spoilt for years, then they don't know what to do with themselves once it runs out. No – but you know, I'll definitely send you nappies for your kids and birthday presents and everything your parents would have wanted me to give you."

"Our parents," Bill said, "would have wanted you to give us money to set up our lives."

"Get a job," snapped Richard, ripping off his sunglasses, so that we could see his eyes were hard, tired, and cold. "I'm not spoiling you brats a penny. Now, aren't we meant to be getting ready?"

"Get a job? I'll get shitty wage, you faggot," Bill snapped, and I muttered something – I don't know what – to him out of the side of my mouth. Maybe _quiet _or _shush. _"I'll complain to the courts," Bill said.

"No, you won't," Richard said, "because I happen to know something. Talk to Bruce Wayne at the funeral today and you'll see why I don't owe you anything. Your parents have a rich friend, so you'll be set up anyway." He paused. "If Bruce Wayne gives you over ten thou, you _can _come and live with me and I'll keep that money and take care of you for a while."

I did speak to Bruce Wayne at the funeral.

The funeral. Two graves neatly dug, two new marble tombstones, the neatness and propriety of the resting places most unlike the state in which their bodies had been found. I found Bruce Wayne and spoke to him as soon as it was convenient for both of us. Bill hung back, supremely uninterested in meeting a playboy billionaire.

"My uncle said to ask you - "

"I'm sorry to interrupt," Wayne said, his handsome face set in concern, "but I have quite a lot to say to you two. First of all, it's very nice to meet you. The last time I saw you, you were very small children. As you know, your parents were close friends of mine. Your uncle isn't applying for custody of you, Anna, did you know that?"

"No," I said, very surprised. I had seen that as a major problem since I had walked in on my uncle going through drawers of my clothes the day before.

"There's a reason for that," Wayne said, "it's because I am your godfather, and your father intended for me to take care of you if anything happened to him. So, Anna, you're welcome to stay at my manor until you graduate high school, and I can support you through college as well - "

"Police college," I blurted out, "I want to be a policewoman."

"Of course, and I'll pay for your training," Wayne smiled, and there was something deeper to his smile; a sort of satisfaction, like my choice had pleased him beyond normalcy, "you'll always both be welcome at my manor, but I would encourage you to live lives of independence."

"Oh. Sure," I said, "I wouldn't want to try and insinuate myself into your life, and become your heiress or anything. Thanks for letting me stay until I'm eighteen – that's all I want – that's all I want ." I said, looking at my uncle as I did. "Seriously, Mr. Wayne, that's very kind of you."

"It's the least I can do for my friends," he tried to smile. "And Bill, if you need any help at all..."

"I need nothing from you," said Bill evenly, looking Wayne up and down, and I had the pain of seeing my brother turn away from Bruce Wayne with unalterable coldness. Then Bill turned toward me and his eyes pierced mine – and I remembered him blurting out – no, simply asking – what does this mean to your life? Do you want to kill the Joker? Do you want to fight crime? Do you want to be a policewoman?

I turned back to the graves, Bruce Wayne's hand on my shoulder, and the _greyness _of the cemetary seemed to swell up and swallow me, and those three questions rang through my head, and for a year, they didn't stop ringing.

I packed my bags, and moved into Wayne Manor. Bruce Wayne was quiet and polite. He offered me the first alcoholic drink I had ever had, a cheerful pink cocktail, and smiled as it was brought in, once I had moved into my room and we were sitting downstairs. I managed a cracked smile.

"Thank you," I said.

"I hoped that might cheer you up. A special treat, though, you're still only sixteen, but – I can bend the rules for a happy drink." That was how I had imagined him. Empty-headed and stuffy but nice. He then leaned forward. I suddenly got a shudder through me remembering Uncle Richard, but he was looking at my dress. Just my dress; not my figure.

"You're remarkably calm for someone who just lost their parents," he said seriously, his face shadowed.

"I - " I had no answer, but I had to say something, "I was thinking about what it represented to my life – what it made me want to do with my life – fight crime, become a policewoman, kill the Joker - "

"No, that was what your brother said about himself; you're copying his answer."

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I had thought this conversation was going to be light. Another side of Bruce Wayne was suddenly before me. It was serious, dark and strangely – and a building intelligence – a brooding intelligence – he seemed aware of this, and suddenly gave a laugh and said,

"You know, I can be serious sometimes. Out of concern for you. Don't tell anyone that I can be this serious. Okay?"

"Okay," there was something weighted in his words that made me wonder about why he had to labour that point. "I – I guess I did copy his answer."

"What's your answer? I'd like to hear it," his voice was dark. He sat forward. "I haven't seen you cry yet."

"It's the shock."

"What kind of shock?"

I drew in a breath and folded one leg over the other. Smoothed my white skirt. Folded my arms. Twisted into myself like a pretzel. Banged one ankle hard against the other. Banged it again. But I felt comfortable with him in general. He was a likeable man. He just wanted to listen my problems, my fears, hopes and dreams; I realised why my father had liked him; he would be a good guardian for a year. I looked up at him with my clear pale green eyes.

"I – was shocked and I – wanted to laugh."

His expression didn't budge an inch. He stood up and went to the silver tray of drinks.

"Alfred," he said, "we're out of drinks."

"The usual, sir?" I heard them very faintly. The room was very long and the echoes flew faintly like ghosts down the room.

"No. A real drink."

"A _real _drink?" Alfred (who seemed to be very nice) said, and I glanced surreptitiously over my shoulder. Alfred's face, half of it, was visible, very surprised. "Why, sir?" He lowered his voice but I only just heard it. He had the same voice as my grandfather, a man with a voice I had loved to listen to.

"She thought it was funny."

"Thought what was funny, sir?"

"I'll tell you later."

I burst out laughing. The sensation delighted me.

"Who came running to answer the door? The little...man...with the worried...frown," I distracted myself by saying. I don't know where that came from. Snatch of song, perhaps? "Who came running to answer the door? A dragon and a man dressed up as a...clown." My mind felt fuzzy as I hummed and half-sang the words, and then I returned to myself, thought nothing more of it, remembered that I had done it, but – didn't care. I forgot how little it suited the situation I was in. I only remembered I turned around and Alfred and Bruce Wayne were staring at me, eyes rather wide, staring closely at my face.

"What?" I said, my face feeling stiff and grey. I felt like I hadn't slept for weeks. I had just slept for fifteen hours.

"Nothing, Anna," Bruce Wayne said gently. "We all react – differently to – I mean – people who lose their parents in terrible murders – I guess we – all react differently." He looked shocked. "In grief, I mean."

"Do you think so? Was I laughing just now?"

"Yes."

"I didn't mean to. Then again, who intends to laugh in advance?"

"Indeed."

Alfred gave his master a significant glance and took the tray away. He would punctually return a minute later with two more drinks – but first he asked,

"What sort of drink will the young lady have?"

"Anna?" Bruce Wayne asked, "what would you like? Another cocktail? One more. If you want."

"Can I have a green cocktail this time?" I said, my mind hazy.

"Of course, Miss," Alfred said, "I trust mint is acceptable?"

"Yes."

Mint was green. Mint it was.


End file.
